Dr John L. T. Chen is currently the Director of Spine service in the Dept. of Orthopaedic Surgery at the Singapore General Hospital. He obtained his medical degree from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in 1985 & continued his post-graduate training in Singapore. He obtained his surgical fellowship  with the Royal College of Surgeons Edinburgh in 1993. He continued his Orthopaedic training in spine surgery and completed a Spine Fellowship in 1998 with the University of Toronto based at the Orthopaedic & Arthritic Hospital in Toronto, Canada.

He has a keen interest in adult spinal deformity & degenerative disorders of the Spine. He is passionate in advancing postgraduate training & education in Spine Surgery. He has received invitations as a speaker & faculty at numerous Orthopaedic Society annual meetings & AO Spine training courses in South & South-East Asia countries including India, Nepal, Myanmar, China, Vietnam, Thailand & Philippines. He is a member of the AO Spine International Faculty Development Task Force & an international member of the North American Spine Society & Academy of American Orthopaedic Surgeons. He is the current lead for the educational committee of the Singapore Spine Society & held the post of Secretary & now Treasurer of the Singapore Orthopaedic Association.

In 2013 he was engaged in Spine Registry development with the International Consortium of Health Outcome Measures (ICHOM) in conjunction with Institute for Strategy & Competitiveness @ Harvard Business School, The Boston Consulting Group & Karolinska Institute Medical University. With ICHOM, he was a member of Work Group & Steering Committee on defining the Minimum Standard Set for Low Back Pain Outcomes Measurement.  In 2015 he was invited as  a panelist at AOSpine Consensus Study Forum on Adult Spine Deformity at Scoliosis Research Society 22nd International Meeting on Advanced Spine Techniques (IMAST) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia .
He remains  an active volunteer for SingHealth International overseas programs to promote best practices & performs spine surgery in hospital centers within the South-East Asian countries.